America's Lost Respect

By PAUL KRUGMAN

New York Times

October 2, 2004

As a result of the American military," President Bush declared last week, "the
Taliban is no longer in existence."

It's unclear whether Mr. Bush
misspoke, or whether he really is that clueless. But his claim was in keeping
with his re-election strategy, demonstrated once again in last night's debate:
a president who has done immense damage to America's position in the world hopes
to brazen it out by claiming that failure is success.

Three years ago,
the United States was both feared and respected: feared because of its military
supremacy, respected because of its traditional commitment to democracy and the
rule of law.

Since then, Iraq has demonstrated the limits of American
military power, and has tied up much of that power in a grinding guerrilla war.
This has emboldened regimes that pose a real threat. Three years ago, would
North Korea have felt so free to trumpet its conversion of fuel rods into bombs?

But even more important is the loss of respect. After the official
rationales for the Iraq war proved false, and after America failed to make good
on its promise to foster democracy in either Afghanistan or Iraq - and, not
least, after Abu Ghraib - the world no longer believes that we are the good
guys.

Let's talk for a minute about Afghanistan, which administration
officials tout as a success story. They rely on the public's ignorance:
voters, they believe, don't know that even though the United States promised to
provide Afghanistan with both security and aid during its transition to
democracy, it broke those promises. It has allowed the country to slide back
into warlordism - and allowed the Taliban to make a comeback.

These days,
Mr. Bush and other administration officials often talk about the 10.5 million
Afghans who have registered to vote in this month's election, citing the figure
as proof that democracy is making strides after all. They count on the public
not to know, and on reporters not to mention, that the number of people
registered considerably exceeds all estimates of the eligible population. What
they call evidence of democracy on the march is actually evidence of large-scale
electoral fraud.

It's the same story in Iraq: the January election has
become the rationale for everything we're doing, yet it's hard to find anyone
not beholden to the administration who believes that the election, if it happens
at all, will be anything more than a sham.

Yet Mr. Bush and his
Congressional allies seem to have learned nothing from their failures. If Mr.
Bush is returned to office, there's every reason to think that they will
continue along the same disastrous path.

We can already see one example
of this when we look at the question of torture. Abu Ghraib has largely
vanished from U.S. political discussion, largely because the administration and
its Congressional allies have been so effective at covering up high-level
involvement. But both the revelations and the cover-up did terrible damage to
America's moral authority. To much of the world, America looks like a place
where top officials condone and possibly order the torture of innocent people,
and suffer no consequences.

What we need is an effort to regain our good
name. What we're getting instead is a provision, inserted by Congressional
Republicans in the intelligence reform bill, to legalize "extraordinary
rendition" - a euphemism for sending terrorism suspects to countries that use
torture for interrogation. This would institutionalize a Kafkaesque system
under which suspects can be sent, at the government's whim, to Egypt or Syria or
Jordan - and to fight such a move, it's up to the suspect to prove that he'll be
tortured on arrival. Just what we need to convince other countries of our
commitment to the rule of law.

Most Americans aren't aware of all this.
The sheer scale of Mr. Bush's foreign policy failures insulates him from its
political consequences: voters aren't ready to believe how badly the war in
Iraq is going, let alone how badly America's moral position in the world has
deteriorated.

But the rest of the world has already lost faith in us. In
fact, let me make a prediction: if Mr. Bush gets a second term, we will soon
have no democracies left among our allies - no, not even Tony Blair's Britain.
Mr. Bush will be left with the support of regimes that don't worry about the
legalities - regimes like Vladimir Putin's Russia.